Tuesday, June 22, 2004

Noguchi's Secret Fortress The Noguchi Museum is a small brick fortress north of the Queensborough bridge in Queens that’s a bit out of the way and easy to miss. But this single-artist museum is one of New York’s gems, You cross a threshold into a covered outdoor space, a bare-bones little warehouse. The very ordinariness of this space adds to the sense of discovery. There are several examples of Isamu Noguchi’s pylons, columns of stone displaying rich variegations of texture, shape, and color that have been delicately refined by the artist. There’s a lovely garden, unspectacular yet easy to appreciate because it does not advertise its artistry. Even though Noguchi was very much a public artist, with playgrounds as well as sculptures and fountains to his credit, this small shrine, with its private unfolding of experiences, is much in the spirit of the work. There is architecture here, but it is the kind of provisional slightly untidy architecture that artists tend to make for themselves. The museum has had a discreet renovation (it now has climate control, for example) and reopened Saturday June 12, with an exhibition in a renovated upper-level space theatrically curated by Robert Wilson. With its shifts of light (total darkness to a green-lit room paved in reflective metal panels) and texture (thatch to pebbles), it surveys the artists entire output but foregrounds Noguchi’s stage work with the choreographer Martha Graham, which will resonate with viewers who’ve newly discovered mid-century modern. The exhibition’s drama is quite in contrast to the unassuming, unself-conscious nature of the rest of the place, but it enriches our view of this classic modernist. posted by mclennan @ 3:19 pm | Permanent link

Sunday, June 20, 2004

Gridlock Since I cannot resist being pedantic, I must confess that there is a common lesson to be drawn from the three tales of travel posted below. It is that the way America builds its transportation infrastructure has all but collapsed. Infrastructure is simply too expensive and too critical to the nation’s economy to be planned, funded, and built willy-nilly but that’s exactly what we now do. Seattle proceeds witlessly because there aren’t actually good American models for doing road alternatives in a city that’s built at semi-suburban density. Penn station founders because we don’t know how to integrate rail with other forms of transportation and we won’t assemble commuter rail and high-speed intercity rail into an integrated, economically workable, sanely funded entity. LaGuardia’s congestion is simply an emblem of what’s developing nationwide as passengers return to flying and the nation refuses to either throw billions to accommodate the traffic or to commit transportation funding to relieving air traffic by intercity rail. We’re throwing billions at unproven airport security measures, though. We know that we can’t get along by building perpetual new highway lanes, but that is, essentially what we do. We need to integrate the planning of roads, rails and air to derive the maximum efficiencies from all, but we don’t. (I’ve ranted about this in more detail here (scroll down to April 1) and on my website.—look under infrastructure) There is a gigantic transportation bill languishing, a victim of Congressional stalemate, that addresses NONE of these issues. There is a vast energy bill, also victimized by political gridlock, that fails to recognize the role sanely planned transportation can play in energy conservation. Transportation may be essential but it is, sadly, a political issue that lacks political sex appeal. We need a transportation Monicagate. Possibilities welcome. posted by mclennan @ 3:08 pm | Permanent link

Friday, June 18, 2004

Journey 3 I flew to Boston and back yesterday, and here was my dilemma. Do I take the train, one of Amtrak’s best services, which is a bit cheaper than flying and vastly more pleasurable though (on paper) a bit more inconvenient? But then Amtrak is often late. Or do I hustle out to LaGuardia, where I supposedly arrive an hour quicker on the USAirways shuttle but must wonder whether I’ll get stuck in traffic, and whether weather or LaGuardia’s perpetual congestion delays will ruin my too-tightly scheduled day? I opt for the plane and am, indeed foiled by a weather delay, congestion at LaGuardia and congestion at Boston induced by a runway resurfacing project. (USAirways neglected to inform passengers of this very predictable delay until they were stuck in the cabin. There’s a reason they’re flirting with bankruptcy.) New York is one of the few American cities that have such transportation choices, but too often each option represents a gamble rather than a reasonable certainty. Arriving in Boston I cab it to Cambridge through parts of the vast Central Artery Project, the Herculean undergrounding of a freeway distribution complex that once ran overhead in the heart of Boston. After a decade and more than $14 billion (most of it federal $), this vast undertaking—probably the most complex and expensive capital projects ever attempted in America, ever—nears completion. And what do I find in this non-rush period? Traffic backed up at several of the onramps. The reason, of course, has to do with increasing the capacity of the trunk highways without increasing the capacity of anything leading to it. So we have a project that has sucked a mind-boggling amount of money out of the treasury and is failing even before it’s completed. posted by mclennan @ 3:07 pm | Permanent link

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Journey 2 While I was in Seattle recently, a kerfuffle broke out over an ambitious local project to create a monorail mass-transit network. The idea of pinning local mass transit hopes on a monorail is one of those peculiarly only-in-Seattle stories that does not bear recounting here—at least yet. In short, though, the effort was spearheaded by buffs (there is a short monorail segment in the city that dates from the Jetson’s-era worlds fair). The buffs got local voters to approve the system, after a light-rail initiative got bogged down in the endless public review proces that is one of Seattle’s chief local entertainments. The transportation-planning establishment finds the idea almost completely cockeyed (and the local engineer that started the latest battle was questioning some of the technical and engineering assumptions) but the buffs defend the concept with near-cultlike commitment, even as the project threatens to sink under exactly the same interest-group infighting that made a mess of the light rail. They all but ran the engineer out of town on a monorail. I can’t speak to the technical issues, but this is the most bizarre transportation spectacle I have seen played out in living memory. The monorial authority operates separately fromt the authority that runs the light rail, which by the way, is separate from the entity that runs most of the bus system. Words cannot convey how stupidly inefficient and wasteful such a setup is. There is no demonstrable place that such a cobbled-together system works well. Cities get stuck with them by historical accident. Only Seattle has actually saddled itself with such a contraption. By the way, few people in Seattle actually seem to be paying attention to the unfolding mess, even though they will bend your ear unrelentingly about the traffic, which is frustrating, but not monumentally so. Instead, playing all over the television was gas-price hysteria, even though gas remains cheap and I saw no evidence of people driving more slowly or otherwise making even the most casual effort to save money. You have to go back to New York City in the 1920s, where three rapid-transit entities laid down three separate subway systems that operated with separate rail and railcar standards and which failed to make even the most obvious and rational of cross-connections. The city has enternally regretted this insane system ever since.I could only conclude that the city was suffering from a form of mass hysteria. posted by mclennan @ 3:03 pm | Permanent link

Saturday, June 12, 2004

Journey 1 I’m belatedly drawing attention to a fine report in the Times that details a stalemate in the long-promised renovation of Penn Station in New York. A handsome design by the New York office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was unveiled along with a very complex deal brokered among many government agencies at the city, state, and federal level—in 1998. Since then nothing has happened. The Times story indicated that cash-starved Amtrak is balking at the modest rent it must pay, even though the $800-million of work (now presumably more expensive) was for its benefit primarily. A great deal is at stake here. The city wants to build tens of millions of square feet of office space in the surrounding blocks. The state wants to put a billion dollar stadium here. The state and city want to add a huge chunk of space to the Javits Convention Center. There’s no place in the vicinity for more cars and trucks, so these vast plans all depend on increasing the capacity of Penn Station. Penn (the disastrous replacement for the great McKim, Meade & White palace), is a misery for passengers and an architectural disaster (abetted recently by renovations carried out by NJTransit within its Penn fiefdom that, for a cool $155 million, make the place look like a pink-granite strip mall for tarts).Perhaps 25 percent of the nation’s rail commuters pass through and a high percentage of Amtrak’s total trips nationwide end or originate here. The Amtrak project could be done by now if it had been pushed hard enough by local officials, who will do anything but work together on such a project. (The funds, theoretically anyway, have long been available.) The uncertainty is also emblematic of the mess that has been made of transportation-infrastructure investment by Congress, which leaves such enormous capital projects perpetually subject to legislative whim (unlike highways) and has failed to give Amtrak a sure financial footing . Amtrak wants out now because Congress and the president are starving it, even though the only place the railroad ever made money has been in the Northeast corridor. The upcoming Republican convention, atop Penn Station in the embarrassing wreck that is Madison Square Garden, would be an excellent moment to press the project’s urgency. posted by jamesrussell @ 2:53 pm | Permanent link